The last week or two has been mostly getting in a routine with classes and doing some more exploring during my free time. I really like my classes although it has been very difficult to get into school mode. I don’t know if my sense of time is still weird or I am just not prepared to have school at this time of year, but it seemed like I was falling in asleep in almost every class that first week. I have resorted to sitting in the very front row of class to keep myself awake, and I don’t mind it as long as the class is interesting I guess.
My favorite class so far (sidenote: the word favorite just came up as misspelled on my computer because I have everything set to Australian spelling) is Coral Reef Ecology. It looks like it is going to be pretty challenging and in-depth and the subject is obviously really interesting to me. For this class we also get to go on a four-day trip during one of our semester breaks out to a lab on the Great Barrier Reef. We’ll be doing a bunch of field studies on the reef out there and I’ll even be doing some scientific diving so I’m really pumped about that. Photography has also been pretty good so far, although we have to rent out the equipment way in advance so I’m kinda bummed about that because I would rather just take pictures of any cool stuff that I come across throughout the week instead of plan ahead what I want to photograph. Oh well, I’m still really pumped about what I’m learning.
Besides classes, I’ve also gone out to Magnetic Island a couple more times with friends. The first time was on a Wednesday when I didn’t have class and we wanted to check out some different bays to look for reefs off of the beach. We found an awesome one but the visibility was crap again. Everybody keeps insisting it is a freak thing for it to be so windy so I’m waiting it out for the snorkelling to get better. We did find a beach that was over run by sand bubbler crabs, which was so cool. I’m stealing from Kevin and saying check out this video (http://videos.howstuffworks.com/animal-planet/29027-fooled-by-nature-sand-bubbler-crabs-video.htm) if you don’t know what they are. Basically in a matter of a few hours when the tide is going out thousands of these crabs and sift through all the sand to get food then pack the sand in to tiny little balls. The balls literally cover the entire beach, and the crabs are everywhere. Pretty sweet. A bunch of us also did some more hiking around and snorkelling on the island on one of the weekends. At one point we decided to try to find a shipwreck that we had heard about that was off one of the beaches. We swam out to a post we thought was marking it but couldn’t find it. When we came back in we learned from the dive shop we were about 15 feet away and just missed it. Ah well, next time.
Besides the island, we also go to the rope swing pretty often. Yeah, the one right by where I bike past a 6 foot croc everyday. It’s fun and we’ve even gone in the middle of the night. My goal is to get a backflip down off of the swing. I also did some mountain biking with my friend Matt up in to the mountains behind school. There are some awesome trails that go up there, and it is a challenge because the brakes on my bike are pretty dodgy. They do a lot of controlled burns up in the hills because it is so dry during the winter that the entire forest could be wiped out if there was a natural fire. It is really cool to watch the mountains in flames at night, and going up there during the day to see everything burned is really cool. I’m going to have to start writing things on here more regularly because I know I am forgetting a ton of stuff, but I will add things as I remember them.
Post fire up in the mountains
I may submit this one for my photography class
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